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Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

Rich Liberals: Please, Please Step Up and Save The Washington Post

By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year. And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.You’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased tenfold in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.So take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

ICE Barbie Targets Family of 5-Year-Old Boy That ICE Abducted
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

ICE Barbie Targets Family of 5-Year-Old Boy That ICE Abducted

After releasing 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from immigration detention, the Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport his family as fast as possible.The agency filed a motion Wednesday to end asylum claims and expedite deportation proceedings for Liam’s family, immigration lawyer Danielle Molliver told MPR News. She described the DHS’s latest motion as “retaliatory.”Last month, federal immigration agents used Liam as bait to try to arrest someone in the child’s house. They detained both Liam and his father, who had been bringing him home from school. While images of Liam surrounded by masked federal agents ignited a national firestorm, the father and son were moved to a processing facility in Texas for deportation. A federal judge ordered them to be freed, finding that there wasn’t enough probable cause to detain them. The family had entered the U.S. legally and applied for asylum upon arrival. “It’s really frustrating as an attorney, because they keep throwing new obstacles in our way. There’s absolutely no reason that this should be expedited. It’s not very common,” Molliver said. A hearing for Liam’s case is scheduled for Friday, but Molliver has requested more time to respond. There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and lawful asylum-seekers are being taken into ICE custody for expedited removal. ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing. Liam’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, told MPR News that the family still lives in fear of being deported. “The government is moving many pieces, it’s doing everything possible to do us harm, so that they’ll probably deport us. We live with that fear too,” Conejo Arias said during an interview conducted in Spanish and translated by MPR News.

AIPAC Spending Is This Close to Backfiring in a Democratic Primary
New Republic • Feb 6, 2026

AIPAC Spending Is This Close to Backfiring in a Democratic Primary

Progressive Analilia Mejia is on the verge of a huge upset win in a special election in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district to replace Mikie Sherill, elected governor of the state last year.Meijia, who helped run Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, is leading Tom Malinowski in the Democratic primary by less than 500 votes as of this writing, upending a race in which the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent tons of money. AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, dumped $2.3 million into the race to attack the early frontrunner Malinowski, an odd course of action considering that it had supported Malinowski in the past. Malinowski’s crime in AIPAC’s eyes was supporting conditions on aid to Israel, a position that is gaining traction among House Democrats as public polling shows increasing numbers of Democrats and Americans opposing Israel’s massacre of Gaza. Mejia, endorsed by leading progressives including Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is on the verge of capitalizing on AIPAC’s gamble. Mejia’s stance on Israel goes even further than Malinowski, as she has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide and pledged not to make any visits to Israel on AIPAC’s dime. Three days after the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Mejia said, “Every fiber of my being is horrified beyond words at what is furthering in Gaza. Yet again we see how oppression & dehumanization leads to despair & unthinkable destruction.” Two weeks later, Mejia called for a ceasefire in Gaza, well before many other Democrats. But Israel and Gaza wasn’t even a central issue in her campaign, taking a backseat to cost-of-living issues. That’s not unlike New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign last year. He too ran a campaign centered around affordability, and his pro-Palestinian stance resulted in millions of dollars spent against him to no avail.Will Mejia eke out an upset win over Malinowski? If so, it would show that AIPAC, long feared on Capitol Hill, is losing its touch.

Splinter: Trump Crushed U.S. Tourism
Jezebel • Feb 6, 2026

Splinter: Trump Crushed U.S. Tourism

American tourism may be permanently debilitated because Trump and the GOP made everyone else around the world realize that there are plenty of other places they’d rather visit than a country run by the biggest antisocial freaks on the planet.

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